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to you seeking clarity and reassurance about the witness statements made by Dame Melanie Dawes at the DCMS Select Committee hearing on 'The future of public service broadcasting' on 15th December.

She was asked by John Nicolson MP for her views on how the BBC should best provide balance in its reporting of transgender issues. He suggested that the BBC are calling in 'transphobic groups' to give a counter argument and likened this to asking a racist organisation to comment on equality for black people.

In her responses she said more than once that she "agreed" with him and that this was "something that we’ve been talking to Stonewall about" and "what we’re going to try to do is to engage with Stonewall who are actually really expert on this". She said Stonewall had "raised this actively with us" and that she had "spoken to the chief executive [of Stonewall] myself". She said she wants to make sure that broadcasters can cover the debate "without causing offence and without bringing inappropriate voices to the table on questions like this".

This is concerning because 'trans issues' includes within it a much wider discussion about how some laws and treatment regimens advocated by transgender pressure groups could impact on other groups in society. This is not a settled issue and remains an active and contentious area of public debate.

Transgender pressure groups frequently refer to individuals and organisations who wish to uphold the existing sex-based rights of women and girls as 'transphobic' and 'anti-trans'. They hold a position of 'no debate' and refuse to participate in any broadcast interviews alongside any advocates for sex-based rights. Indeed, I have direct experience of being dropped from a BBC radio discussion myself when a transgender panellist branded Fair Play For Women as 'like the Ku Klux Klan'. This is a gross misrepresentation of my organisation who's stated aims are respectful, constructive, and evidence-based debate. As such, we have been engaged as stakeholder representatives by a range of respected organisations including Sport England, World Rugby, IPSO, Ministry of Justice and the Government Equalities Office.

For this reason, it is wrong for OfCom to be engaging exclusively with representatives lobbying for one side of the debate. It is particularly concerning that Stonewall is considered the 'experts on this' by Dame Dawes suggesting that they will be having undue influence on OfCom's view on what is the 'right information to give to broadcasters' and who are the 'inappropriate voices'

For busy people who just can't be bothered to look into the details of the trans debate, the easy way out is to assume Stonewall are the experts. Melinda Dawes, head of Ofcom, is a classic case here. But as FPFW point out, Stonewall are very far from being the impartial experts people lazily assume: on the contrary they're a lobby group. The census farce has perhaps made more people aware of this.

Cherry blossom this morning:

e gave him some he would shout, ‘More, more.’ You can never forget seeing somebody die from hunger.”

Later on the family had a TV, which the police came to check on. There was one channel, which spouted government propaganda. School was strict. “One of my friends was walking like Charlie Chaplin and some of us burst out laughing,” Park said. “The teachers shouted at us. They were worried for our safety if we were caught.”

Every home had framed photographs of Kim and later his son, Kim Jong-il, father of the present ruler, Kim Jong-un. Was it all for show? “Not at all. We loved them,” she said. “We called them the father, and the Workers’ Party was the mother. We didn’t have any information from outside. We didn’t have anything to compare our lives to. The only movies we had were Second World War films from the Soviet Union and Romania. They were seen as acceptable because they were made in other communist countries.” […]

Last week she walked the streets of Bury, placing Conservative Party newsletters through letterboxes for Greater Manchester’s mayoral candidate, Laura Evans. The headline reads: “Labour council spends £700 a day on elections consultant.” The pamphlet looks suspiciously like a newspaper. “In North Korea, you would be arrested and taken away for this,” she said, dressed in a black flat cap, her glossy black hair poking out the sides. She is grinning as she walks down the street.

What does she love most about the UK? “Being able to smile,” she said. “For me, this is freedom.”

semantics of both sides.

"And it did not help that all the money for the project was provided by the South," he added.

Instead of serving as a confidence-building measure that would lead to bigger and more meaningful exchanges between the two sides, the dictionary project has gotten stuck, he said, while any move to revive it will lead to the same issues re-emerging.

"The Unification Ministry has so many ideas, plans and projects, but they cannot overcome the anger of the North," he said. "The people there don't want to hear how the South is helping them with medical aid, food or compiling a dictionary. The people of the North have been told that the South is their archenemy and to be suspicious of any joint projects.

"How did they ever think this could succeed?"

If there's no good will on the part of the North – which there clearly isn't – then to present this as a "firm step" towards reunification is absurd. It sounds like a worthwhile project anyway, with its own rationale. It really doesn't need this pathetic unification breast-beating.

Of course the South is in an impossible situation, but there's no use pretending that they're dealing with a rational counterpart that's basically interested in the same thing the South's interested in. That's clearly not the case. It's like constantly presenting sweeties and prettily wrapped gifts to a pack of hyenas, in the hope that eventually they'll come round and start to be nice and friendly. They won't, because they're hyenas, and what hyenas want is to eat you.

What Pyongyang is really frightened of, as we've seen, is the spread of South Korean culture. Why can't Seoul capitalise on this – renew the balloon drops, whatever – instead of these earnest but doomed attempts to hold out the hand of friendship?

al sex is the same as your gender erases your statistical presence.

In January Sir Ian Diamond, head of the ONS, told the Today programme it had moved to a definition of legal sex only. Sense seemed to have prevailed. Yet weeks later, when the ONS announced its guidance, it said sex could be defined by a document “such as a passport”. But passport gender can be changed with a simple letter: it does not constitute legal sex. Then in late February, with no official announcement, the ONS made the census live, so people could start filling it in. It had pushed through a policy, regardless of expert opposition or the law, and now insisted it was too late for a legal challenge.

Within days Fair Play crowdfunded £100,000 from 3,200 people and were before a judge who upheld their case, ordering the ONS to change the guidance on the sex question. The ONS could not unilaterally amend the legal definition of a key demographic variable.

Why does this matter? Because it exposes the depth of civil service policy capture. Self-ID on the census was supported by the ONS, the Cabinet Office, NHS England and even the Equality and Human Rights Commission, whose whole purpose is to uphold “protected characteristics” under the 2010 Equalities Act, including sex. These are public bodies which all pay to participate in Stonewall’s diversity champions programme. Thus taxpayers are funding a lobby group to pressure the government to undermine a law it opposes but has failed to change by open democratic means; a law which protects women….

A full inquiry is needed into this travesty: why did the ONS squander public funds and its own reputation? And what is the relationship between its senior team and activists?

Increasingly the political divide is not between left and right but between those who uphold objectivity, data, evidence and rule of law versus those who will jettison everything, even science and reason, for ideology. If we cannot trust our gold-standard data body to defend facts against political interests, we are truly lost.

A full inquiry is needed not just into this travesty, but into the whole extent of Stonewall UK's influence in institutions across the country via its highly political diversity champions scheme, from the government here, to universities, to the BBC. They all bought into it in the name of progress and inclusion and being nice and smiley, but its true ideology now needs to be exposed and questioned. Why are taxpayers funding this scheme when it so clearly undermines the rights and protections of half the population?

is vulnerable to exploitation by any such group – just now it is the trans rights lobby, but it could have been a pro-Brexit group, or a pro-nuclear group; anything.  One solution to this problem might be to raise the quorum for conferences to a higher percentage of the total membership; there could be campaigns at the local branch level to encourage more members to engage in the democratic process….

As a result of all of this, I am going on strike.  Not just me: the officers of the Bridgwater and West Somerset branch, along with those active members with whom we work closely on a day-to-day basis, are going on strike.  Our acting Secretary, Tony Seaman, has this morning taken the further step of resigning altogether from the Green Party.  We are not willing to represent the Green Party in its current dysfunctional state; nor are we willing to ask others to stand as candidates or to take part in election campaigning for the Green Party.  This strike will last until, as a minimum requirement, Emma Bateman's suspension is lifted.

With all good wishes to all of you

Caitlin Collins

Co-ordinator, Bridgwater and West Somerset Green Party

My only argument would be with the contention that any single-issue group could have captured the party, which I doubt. I'd guess that there's quite a reasonable level of support for the trans activists within the party rank and file. This, after all, is widely seen as the next great progressive movement in our liberation from all manner of unpleasantnesses like racism and homophobia, and is particularly in vogue, I'd imagine, amongst the ranks of the young middle class idealists who form the backbone of the party. Luckily, though, there are those, like the esteemed Bridgwater & West Somerset branch here, who see through it all. 

Hannah Lucinda Smith in the Times – Uighur children sent to ‘orphan camps’ in China:

China has begun rounding up and sending the children of Uighur exiles to “orphan camps” where they are forced to speak Mandarin and parrot Communist Party propaganda, parents claim.

Six families who have fled Xinjiang have told Amnesty International that friends and relatives sent coded messages, photos and videos telling them that their children had been moved to camps. Many believe that they will never see them again.

The allegations are further evidence of the repression of the Uighur minority in Xinjiang, where more than a million adults have been sent to concentration camps since 2017. Many parents left their children in the care of relatives as they fled from China, believing that they could return when the political situation improved, or arrange their exit. Instead, the carers were detained and the children taken to the camps.

Repression? Genocide is the word we're looking for here.

Mihriban Kader and her husband, Ablikim Memtinin, fled to Italy from their home in Kashgar in 2016. They had been ordered to hand over their passports, a common occurrence as the crackdown on Uighurs, who are mostly Muslim, grew.

Their four teenage children travelled 3,100 miles to the Italian consulate in Shanghai to seek safe passage. They were denied entry and told to go to the embassy in Beijing before they were seized by police and sent to camps.

“Now my children are in the hands of the Chinese government and I am not sure I will be able to meet them again,” Mihriban said. “What hurts most is that, to my children, it’s as if their parents don’t exist anymore.”

In another case, Rizwangul, who was working in Dubai, was warned by her sister in March 2017 that it was not safe for her to return to Xinjiang. Her sister told her that her six-year-old son Mohammed, who was with relatives in China to attend school, had been taken to “study” a week after he returned from Dubai. Rizwangul understood this to mean that he had been taken to a camp.

Update: Mihriban Kader writes about her experience in today's Guardian – China has detained my young children. I don't know if I'll ever see them again.

Otis Redding with the Bar-Kays:

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P29E7YYMD7o&w=550&h=309]

Cleveland, Ohio, December 7th 1967. 

The next day, December 10th, Otis and the band crashed in Otis' private plane in Lake Monona, Wisconsin. Ben Cauley of the Bar-Kays was the only survivor. 

emonstrating with their community preachers. Brooklyn, New York. USA. 1963. © Leonard Freed | Magnum Photos

City prison. New Orleans, Louisiana. USA. 1963. © Leonard Freed | Magnum Photos

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. being greeted on his return to the US after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Baltimore, MD. USA. October 31, 1964. © Leonard Freed | Magnum Photos

Football team. South Carolina. USA. 1963. © Leonard Freed | Magnum Photos

Street scene, children walk hand in hand. Harlem. NY. USA. 1963. © Leonard Freed | Magnum Photos

as many as 1,729 people.

But all Obama did was effectively outsource the enforcement of the UN’s prohibitions on poison gas to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and in the process, proved to the tyrants of the world that they could get away with mass murder because the U.S. would not stand in their way. The deal with Moscow didn’t even prevent Assad from using poison gas as a weapon of mass destruction. More than 300 chemical attacks carried out by the regime under Russian protection have been clearly documented.

Syria is now, effectively, part of Iran's Shi'ite crescent. And the excuse for not intervening – the vaunted Russian air-defence system the Assad regime suposedly had at its disposal?

It never existed, despite the claims of the Obama administration, and it still doesn’t exist. In 2017 and 2018, in a largely performative effort, U.S., French and British missiles struck installations in Syria without breaking a sweat. Since 2013, the Israeli Air Force has carried out hundreds of attacks on Hezbollah targets inside Syria. The Russian anti-aircraft batteries have been as useless to Assad as his Chinese-installed low-altitude radar systems we’re all supposed to be so afraid of.

The Israelis have lost a single F-16 in all this activity. The fighter-bomber’s pilots bailed out over Israel, and the plane went down on a hillside near Kibbutz Harduf. In retaliation, or maybe just for sport, the Israeli Air Force destroyed more than a third of Syria’s air defences.

The only reason Assad has been able to carry on with his savagery is that the world has allowed him to get away with it. And the world owes the Syrian people a lot more than a bureaucrat’s apology.